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One of the good things I see coming out of Robinhood blocking trading, Twitter and Reddit booting problematic users, Parler getting vaporized, etc. is a sudden realization amongst people of just how easily major parts of their lives can be instantly turned off by intermediaries.
My hope is that this will drive a reformist movement around digital rights (speech, commerce, etc.) As well as a movement from platforms to protocols.
"Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)"
Article subtitle:
> Altering the internet's economic and digital infrastructure to promote free speech
I am somewhat skeptical of crypto, but I do hope that the DeFi ecosystem, 20 years in the future, will act as a democratizing force for financial markets.
I'm skeptical of the idea that availability of decentralized services should be dependent on the activity of a market driving it. If for some reason, something unfavorable were to happen with that market, the services tied to it would be in jeopardy.
That seems like a terrifying point of failure to have, unless I'm misunderstanding how it works.
Perhaps a parallel here is: if the fiat markets are struggling, then small businesses may struggle and lack the business they need to sustain themselves due to economic fears and self-preservation, but that business can exist in some form without the market through free trade or other means of currency or agreements to provide products and services, not beholden to the mercy of a volatile, inaccessible digital system that the vast majority of people don't understand very well.
It requires some way to fund it, but that needn't necessarily be ETH. It also well could be, and they have first mover advantage. But, and it's a big but, I think the most important thing people who know much about crypto forget is:
Other people are not like you. Most people have still never even heard of Etherium. Most people won't touch something like that without explicit approval from a government. Which, obviously, is somewhat contrary to the point.
I think the real long term (20+ years) winners in this space will gracefully marry the old world with the new, until society has gotten used to these concepts and we can slowly deprecate some of the centralization.
> Most people have still never even heard of Ethereum
This statement was true in 2016, 2018 and 2021. The difference being the momentum - a LOT more people have heard of Ethereum now than back then. I think you might be underestimating the network effect that Ethereum has in the space. All the tooling, beginner-friendly tutorials/books/blogs, institutions and funds flowing into the projects, the sheer number of people working on projects is super impressive.
For anything else to catch up with Ethereum, it's going to take a lot more than "being better technologically". Ethereum currently does have major scaling issues but the community is converging on the "rollups" Layer-2 solutions [1] as a temporary option until it gets added into Eth2. So I suspect the next few months will be a little rough but things like Matic.network or Optimism will start maturing.
I just think it's similar to some of the earlier internet days like shopping online or sending emails - in its early days most people did not know much about these concepts except for the tech community and early adopters.
Throwing this out there, too: assorted government restrictions and lockdowns imposed by regional public health officials. The early ones were more justified because we knew less, but as the pandemic drug on, the burden of proof justifying closures needed to increase, and legislators needed to step up and legitimize the policies. It's like how the president can wage war for 90 days, but then has to get approval from congress.
Especially in states like California. My rich friends can and continue to travel. My friends in the service sector are at home collecting a meager unemployment. It doesn’t jibe well with the ethos CA proudly proclaims. They shutdown outdoor dining and even playgrounds while Costco, Amazon warehouses and Best Buy can be packed. We also know and have data that masks work but salons were closed. (A case in Texas comes to mind where a barber had covid but didn’t pass it to any of the 45 clients because they wore masks). What was way more important was good ventilation and indoor masking.
In general social psychology have to be factored in as well. Anecdotally speaking, shutting down outdoor dining pushed more people to party at home.
No, we don't have data that masks are protective in a salon situation where people are in close contact for a long time. I wouldn't trust the masks that most people are using (surgical masks with half-inch gaps on either side and quarter-inch gaps around the nose, or single-layer cloth masks) to protect me in that scenario.
Agreed. An important thing to remember about the salon story mentioned above is that it is not 45 independent exposure experiments. Some people never shed much virus, or the stylist might not have been shedding very much on that particular day. If you tracked 45 different infected stylists, each working with one client, you might get very different results. This one story definitely does not prove you are safe at a salon as long as you are wearing a mask! (Although please do wear one if you must go).
I'm with you on this. It's shameful that Congress and State Legislatures have abdicated power to executive functionaries indefinitely. We're closing in on D-Day+1 year and our deliberative bodies have yet to deliberate our public health policies (although Congress has proven they can stimulate demand for consumer goods, from time to time).
It's not about reasonableness as much as it's about officials enacting the policy unilaterally. Twitter disabling Trump's account might be reasonable, but it was a pretty unilateral decision.
We need to put more people at risk, because we can't meet some nebulous, ever-shifting standard that asks us to trade human lives for dollars of economic activity. Nobody wants to pin down exactly how many dollars they think a human life is worth, though.
On the one hand, we've got every special interest group under the sun loudly shouting that their business is special, and must be allowed to operate as if nothing has changed over the past year.
On the other hand, we've got public health - a communal good, that everyone is responsible for, but nobody gets held responsible for.
At the risk of sounding like an "I told you so" type of person, it is frustrating to speak out and see others speak out about future consequences of these kinds of actions, only to be drowned out by people liberally applying the slippery slope fallacy argument.
I've never understood how a slippery slope argument is a fallacy, let alone a logical fallacy (like false syllogism or no true scotsman). The idea is essentially looking at current trends and extrapolating into the future. No prediction is necessarily correct, but it's not necessarily wrong either.
The other comment has it, but two ways to think about it. "If I have one glass of water I might have another. Then another. And so on until I drown myself."
The main one though is assuming the parties cant adjust course part way though. "If we turn this ship this way we will crash into that island in two days!"
Extropolation is different as it takes into a account changes in behaviour and real world constraints
Yes, the extrapolation is often applied to people who really want to achieve one thing going in a particular direction, so it makes sense there. "You want to do X which is not terrible evil in itself, but if we let you, you'll want to do more things like X so we don't want that precedent"
That’s because it’s not automatically a fallacy. That’s a huge misconception.
> Logic and critical thinking textbooks typically discuss slippery slope arguments as a form of fallacy but usually acknowledge that "slippery slope arguments can be good ones if the slope is real—that is, if there is good evidence that the consequences of the initial action are highly likely to occur. The strength of the argument depends on two factors. The first is the strength of each link in the causal chain; the argument cannot be stronger than its weakest link. The second is the number of links; the more links there are, the more likely it is that other factors could alter the consequences."
It's because it's not an argument about the thing itself, it's an argument about a speculative thing that might happen. You can rebut it by just saying "but that won't happen". So using it in an argument kinda inherently gets you into an unprovable realm.
In various avenues where it commonly appears (guns, gay marriage, speech, privacy, etc) it's particularly unhelpful because the US typically lags other western nations on this stuff.
So an opposition that relies on "what if" scenarios to oppose progressive change is often one which is either unaware-of or has explicitly looked at other nations that are 10-50 years ahead on whatever the policy is, and discovered that enacting step X did not, in fact, lead to a downward spiral into nightmare scenario Y.
If I say it's a slippery slope from A to B, what that's supposed to mean is that A being true will increase the risk of B becoming true if other things happen as well.
How it's often used though is that if A is a slippery slope to B then A is equivalent to B, and thus any issue with B is an unavoidable issue for A. And of course it gets worse when people jump from A to Z.
But if everyone started correctly applying logical induction for every piece of reasoning, we'd all become mindless robotic automata, hardly better than giant abacuses, and art, hope and love would die.
It's not a fallacy. It's more like a "logic smell" that means you should look closer to see if the arguer is jumping to conclusions. If they are you should still investigate, e.g. the chain of events they are describing may have actually happened in history or could be related from personal experience. Affording them merit based on that is probably questionable in terms of formal logic, but it might not be unwise.
IMO Slippery slope arguments can definitely be valid. Slippery slope fallacies are failed slippery slope arguments. To successfully argue for the slippery slope, one needs to actually argue that the slope exists and will lead to the ultimate consequence with meaningful certainty. The tactic is so common in sophistry: merely stating A -> B -> C -> D -> "nuclear holocaust" does not make it so.
Like... if an event has an 80% chance of occurring as a result of an action, it seems that the event is highly likely to occur. If this has an 80% chance causing of a different event, which has an 80% chance of a different event, leading to an 80% chance of a different event, the probability of the final event from a point in time before the first event occurred would be 41%.
Arguments are a construction of information intended to induce an understanding of probability among others, and skipping steps along the way weakens trust in that conclusion.
A slippery slope argument assumes the maximum degenerate outcome of sliding down the slope as a certainty, that no one will be able to correct for, mitigate or reverse the slide when it starts. That's what makes it a fallacy - it's a thought terminating cliche meant to eliminate the possibility of nuance, as any middle ground is implicitly part of the slope.
Otherwise, it's just an argument that risk exists, which is obvious and uninteresting.
Or if it's really bad, they make up entirely fanciful slopes that you could fall down.
Does it count as a slippery slope fallacy if the government argues that not stopping encrypted communications will result in terrorists killing your grandma? Because I heard that one a lot when Bush was president and they haven't really ever stopped using it. Is there a better fallacy for that example?
It's effective, because markets (including the marketplace of ideas) are irrational and bad faith tactics are often more effective at influencing people (at least in the short term) than reason and verifiable fact. I wouldn't consider it valid, though.
Ok, since it's a fallacy, I have some mountain trails I'd like you to walk today. They are icy, but since it's a fallacy, I doubt you'll fall to your death.
I actually think you are sadly wrong with that hope, as much as I also wish it were true.
Unfortunately, many people (sadly including the far left, who 10 years ago I would have called myself part of) & the media are actively celebrating these blocks and shutdowns because it serves their ideology. For now.
Robinhood was just hit with class action lawsuit over this:
The financial trading app Robinhood is been hit with a federal class action lawsuit after it restricted trades to stocks popular on the Reddit forum r/WallStreetBets, sending Redditors and app users into a meltdown.
The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York on Thursday, alleges that the app “purposefully, willfully, and knowingly removing the stock ‘GME’ from its trading platform in the midst of an unprecedented stock rise, thereby deprived [sic] retail investors of the ability to invest in the open-market and manipulating the open-market.”
I definitely support the notion of moving from platforms to protocols, at least in theory. I do think you're going to run into the need to regulate wherever communication starts impinging on not-purely-informational constructs, like securities.
I really hope that gambling on GME is not a "major part" of a significant number of people's lives.
> I really hope that gambling on GME is not a "major part" of a significant number of people's lives.
It's a major part of the mega wealthy's lives. They've profited in this pandemic and it's not because of the fundamentals. Shorts squeeze the market too much but they ( hedge funds) should be responsible adults and take their losses. Not force Robinhood to unethically force sell it's massive user base to liquidate b/c their system bit their biggest customer.
We're about to see whether the people actually have rights or if this is actually a class warfare situation. I suspect it's the latter.
It's absolutely the latter. GME is a meme stock that people will forget about in 3 months. If 2008 didn't cause anyone to go to jail (where millions lost their houses and retirements), manipulating a short squeeze on a failing company certainly won't.
I was thinking more about being able to trade online, not GME specifically.
TBH 'protocols not platforms' has become kind of a slogan lately, but history doesn't make it look too promising. Email is a protocol, but it has largely been dominated by Google.
A really compelling product can capture a protocol.
Could it be that people are just so used to platforms, that even in the case of the email protocol, they prefer to jump onto the Gmail platform that abstracts away from the protocol and provides a nice, easy to use platform? If so, "protocols, not platforms" remains justified, and proponents might hope that as people get more comfortable with protocols, they will drift away not only from the Facebooks and Twitters of the world, but also the Gmails.
For me personally, even if we end up with large players offering the largest (presumably most product-focused) instances of various protocols (Gmail with email, imagine Tiwtter hosting the largest Mastodon instance, Discord providing Matrix hosting), the fact I have the freedom to federate and set up my own instance or pay a smaller provider that will respect my privacy, is still a much better situation than the current "platforms, no protocols".
Realistically though nothing at this moment can supplant gmail without people willing to move away from gmail. They make it hard for people to do their own thing because they spam filter out legitimate email coming from domains that they don't like.
True but I just migrated my email away from gmail due to "general google worries" and most colleagues dont realise Ive changed and continue to email me
> My hope is that this will drive a reformist movement around digital rights (speech, commerce, etc.) As well as a movement from platforms to protocols.
I hope so too and I hope that movement will develop and adopt technological solutions and not advocate for government force. This is an opportunity for people to control their means of communication and create a more robust internet that can better withstand censorship attempts in the future. I fear it will instead be taken advantage of by people who want to increase government control perhaps to prevent competition with the currently dominant actors on the market. Any further normalization of government control of communication or the internet must be resisted if we are to have any chance to keep the truly wonderful thing that the internet is today, despite all its imperfections.
From my perspective, you just flipped the purpose of 1A.
Right now you have the right to associate or disassociate with whomever you like (protected classes aside).
In your altered future, the government forces churches to allow atheists and rival religions to be allowed to speak at the church, despite the desires of the owners and congregation. It would effectively be compelled association.
Trouble is when government gives out monopolies, or supporting monopolies they like.
Government currently closed side.
Government has chosen atheism as its religion. Very hostile toward other religions. Everyone pays for government school, but want to a Christian education, then you have to pay twice.
I find the monopoly issue troubling, but I don’t understand how your proposal fixes it.
Government schools aren’t atheist - they are secular. They simply aren’t allowed to teach Christianity because Jews and Muslims would have the same “I have to pay twice” complaint you mentioned.
Also, what you say about Christian education is factually wrong. There are plenty of places in the USA where you can find a Christian Charter school or use school vouchers.
I don't go to a building and dance and sing to my belief of no diety.
I do not go and seek out others who believe in the lack of a diety to associate and grow together.
I don't go on to claim wars over the land holy to my belief of no diety.
I don't go on to terrorize my children and tell them they are unloved because they're born in a way that offends my belief in the lack of a diety.
I don't go on to terrorize my neighbors and tell them they are unloved because they offend my belief in the lack of a diety.
I don't go to other people who have different beliefs and tell them they are wrong due to their belief in a diety. And that my belief is the only way they can be saved.
Atheism is NOT a religion, it is not a system of beliefs in any meaningfully comparable way. You can rearrange words all you want, but the difference in result (not word choice) is anything but subtle.
You will find that your statements are easily flipped if you are truly honest in looking for answers.
My intention is not to paint with a wide brush, just to demonstrate that everyone has beliefs, and they manifest in different ways.
>>>>I don't go to a building and dance and sing to my belief of no diety. ( I believe seculars call it a rave.)
>>>>>>I do not go and seek out others who believe in the lack of a diety to associate and grow together. (any number of activities can fall in this category in fact)
>>>>>>I don't go on to claim wars over the land holy to my belief of no diety. (I believe are referring to Bush/Obama nation-building)
>>>>>> I don't go on to terrorize my children and tell them they are unloved because they're born in a way that offends my belief in the lack of a diety. (I believe you are referring to the secular terrorism, that is human-to-human, i.e. calling others "Deplorables" )
>>>>>I don't go on to terrorize my neighbors and tell them they are unloved because they offend my belief in the lack of a diety. (see above)
>>>>>I don't go to other people who have different beliefs and tell them they are wrong due to their belief in a diety. And that my belief is the only way they can be saved. (I believe there is no need to say X is wrong when instead they resort to shut them up #cancelculture)
Atheism is not a religion, but it is a belief system like any other. It may appeal to logical people, but that doesn't make it better or worse. Its just a different way to perceive the world around you.
Not sure how any of that relates to my rearranging the words. I was just making it follow the dictionary definition of atheism more closely, i.e. belief that there is no god.
No more implication than that. It is, however, actively a belief. It's not "I don't care" or "it's different to the one you believe in", or "I don't believe there is a god", it is "I believe there is no god"
Never said atheism was a religion, would never say that because it's objectively false.
If you believe stamp collectors are the source of all evil in the world, and congregate with other anti-stamp collectors to share your common struggle, maybe.
It's one thing to not believe in unicorns, it's another to define yourself in opposition to unicorn believers, which many atheists do.
That's a good point, and I think it points out the fundamental misunderstanding in the comment I was replying to: conflation of atheism with radical atheism, particularly New Atheism.
My comment didn't mention 'radical' or 'New'. The location of "belief" makes the sentence an accurate description of atheism or not.
Adding 'types' in front of the word just continues us down the path of words not really meaning anything anymore.
Are radical atheists just atheists that act like dicks about it? Don't call them radical atheists, just call them dicks. Is a New Atheist one that does interpretive dance to explain their belief that there is no god? That's just an unlikely combination of two things, one of which is atheism.
Eg. I'm a radical grammarian (a dick when it comes to grammar).
True and it points out that the U.S. government position is actually agnosticism, i.e. it does not take a position one way or another on supernatural deities or other religious concepts.
>Everyone pays for government school, but want to a Christian education, then you have to pay twice.
Work with your government to have you taxes assigned to the Christian school. Here in Ontario Canada when you file your taxes you select if your child is attending catholic school and the catholic school board gets revenue equal to the number of people attending.
So the government would force private corporations to let anyone say what they wanted on their sites? And this new sweeping government power would somehow.... restrict the government?
Do you not see how that's contradictory?
And what would it even look like? Would Hacker News no longer be allowed to have moderators?
A better way would be to update the definition of a public square to take into account the exponential scaling offered by digital services. Communication and commerce infrastructure should not be allowed to censor the moment they cross a critical point in scale.
That's part of the Sophie's Choice. If we have private owned social media, then they will moderate according to public opinion. If we have us government run social media then we have no moderation at all because 1st amendment applies only to us government.
So is it morally allowable to discuss <abhorrent topic> online? Should it be law to allow or disallow <abhorrent topic>?
Who decides what the majority of people consider to be abhorrent?
I think you central questions it the most important one, but the dichotomy between private and public is forced. A phone company is not forced to moderate the communication of its clients.
I don't believe parent said they were forced, only that they would do it. And that makes sense, since their desire is to minimize damage to their brand.
There is a simple solution to this if you don't like the way they behave: stop using their product, and recommend others do the same.
Of course, your not using it doesn't prevent others from using it if they want to, but that's freedom of choice for you.
I am all for the free market, but when companies grow too dominant it no longer works, and we should not pretend otherwise. Just look at what happened to Parler.
Alright, I jumped the gun there I guess. Last I heard they did find hosting elsewhere because, and this is the important point, none of the companies that shut them down had a monopoly on internet communication.
I agree, its an open problem. One one hand no one elected these companies as arbiters of what is good but on the other society at large is not equipped to handle the tsunami of speech that the internet enabled. Something has to be done.
I'm not sure if you were trying to be sarcastic, but to your last point; I think it is overlooked (intentionally or not) that the Constitution is already a set of laws and the highest laws at that. The "Bill of Rights" is not what people have been misled to believe, a list of rights you have and are given by government. In fact, they are the bill of laws that restrain the government from infringing on the natural God given rights every American already has by birth.
Having a correct and accurate understanding of that carries a whole host of implications with it, e.g., it makes the tech companies' censorious autocratic behavior a violation of the natural God given human rights that the government is as prohibited from abridging as much as the tech companies that fall under it's jurisdiction.
What we are facing, just to continue the example to further illustrate the point, is the tech companies are violating human rights through their censorious ways and they are violating the Constitution, the highest law of the land. If the USA were still a functional and healthy society any court would issue an immediate order to require all tech companies to not violate the human rights that the Constitution prohibits any inferior jurisdiction (everything falling under the Constitution, i,e., everything) from violating. The US Code even provides penalties for the violation of the Constitutional laws that the Government and the tech companies are persistently and even maliciously violating on a regular basis.
It is rather clear that the far larger problem is the breakdown of fundamental rule of law (mutually agreed upon parameters for peace) and the replacement and encroachment of ever more rule of power (I will do whatever I want because I have the ability to make you). It will not end well one way or another if it is not fixed soon, and it does not look like those with the lust of power in their eyes have any intention of giving up anything.
The Bill of Rights doesn’t enumerate rights for Americans, it enumerates them for everyone (outside of specific voting rights).
And those rights are only to protect you from government actions because it’s the ultimate monopoly.
The first amendment does not give you the right to enter someone else’s house to spread your political opinions, just as the second doesn’t give you the right to walk in to their home with your loaded guns.
And stop trying to redefine the word monopoly. The internet is completely free and anyone can post whatever they want on their own web site.
Yes, to a point, the 'internet is free'. But you are sort of twisting the point a bit I think. Not only does it cost money to have a website in many cases, but to be close to 'free' in terms of what you can post the theoretical person you are referring to needs to run their own web server, and their own DNS server, and hopefully they don't expect to need a domain name...
Otherwise, it is not in fact free. Registrars can take your domain (look what is happening to eu domains owned by UK folx) and web hosts, are in part responsible for the content they host and can refuse to continue to do business with you.
Hell, even if you roll your own setup, the ISP you use can still choose not to do business with you, leaving your entire setup offline.
You seem to be working towards the core issue (eg. town square versus multiple substitute vendors) but you missed it while talking about cost and irrelevant details (eg. A website can be hosted without a DNS record).
As I see it, the core issue is that with enough substitutes denying business to a person/organization, the customer can effectively be denied access to “the town square”.
In the relevant case law, the “town square” is only applied when there was only a single meeting space in the town. In that case, it was a private mall. Twitter doesn’t apply as a town square on the internet because there are plenty other places to communicate on the internet, even if it is not as convenient or wide reaching. The problem lies in the case where all substitutes for a town square all block you.
The solution historically was to insist on a common carrier designation for certain utilities.
For the cynics like myself. The lack of action on the part of the government to restrict and hold corporations to the same level as the government is supposedly held by the constitution seems intentional.
Its a backdoor way around the constitutional restrictions. AKA the government can't restrict free speech or search your house everyday, but its going to allow everyone else to restrict and search your house for the same effect. Given the close ties between the leaders & .001%, the result is the same. It won't matter to you when you get charged with a crime you didn't commit whether the government was tracking your phone or the phone company reports your phone to the government. The result is the same.
No one is restricting anyone’s speech or searching their house. Sorry that you can’t force other people to host your thoughts tho, sounds so frustrating.
Because where I live the government via corporations is scraping up "metadata" which includes people's web cams feeds, phone records, etc. AKA searching their house. And if you haven't been paying attention, as despicable as the speech is, political "speech" is being suppressed by large tech and media companies, and to a lesser extent what people actually say in public spaces, be that the library or the workplace.
It is not a search of your house if you broadcast your web cam on the internet, just like it doesn’t violate the 4A if you house emanates a strong smell of drugs or has a massive heat bloom visible from IR cameras on a helicopter flying over the neighborhood. I wish we had stronger protections against these conditions but we don’t.
And when has ever had a legal right to political speech at their workplace? Unless you have an employment contract which explicitly guarantees (such as teacher tenure) your employer can fire you for tons of reasons. Some states have labor laws that require “for cause”, but if you are talking politics at a workplace where that is not the core business, it’s not hard for an employer to argue your discussion adversely affects business.
The key point is that “government” is doing something you find despicable. Whether corporations cooperate is by far the lesser concern.
There is a reason Us corporations can’t disclose electronic search warrants to their owners, or why no one kicked Trump off their platform despite incessant rule violations until he was days from leaving, it’s called raw political power.
What distinction are you trying to make here? A completely open protocol with no single controlling entity would not be inherently beholden to government control or laws like a platform would be. It can result in the distribution of illegal content such as child porn. How is this not an example of potential anarchy?
Email is an open protocol. If I send an email that's illegal, say death threats or child porn, the government can put me in jail. There doesn't need to be a single controlling entity for that to work.
The process of doing that involves investigation, subpoenas, and warrants, and is subject to laws created in a more or less democratic process. No part of it requires anyone to prevent me from sending illegal emails, just an apparatus to punish me if I do.
Anarchists as a political group usually don't like it when anarchy is compared to chaos, as this is usually a comparison that was formed by their ideological opponents.
I still don't understand this point. I am not describing chaos. I am describing the specific drawbacks of a lack of centralized authority overseeing things. Isn't that the dictionary definition of anarchy. What am I missing?
Rather than proposing a new technological solution to the problem ("platforms to protocols") which may work but is unproven, we could simply restart the use of existing tools that have been proven to work. This has the advantage of being a strategy that can be explained to non-technical folks.
If I have a car that worked great 50 years ago but haven't been able to turn it on since the 70s when my neighbor destroyed the engine, I would not call that a proven, working car.
The "existing tools" have been proven to have a major weakness, namely they can be neutered by regulatory capture. Unless you can get everyone to magically forget how they circumvented the rules last time, you can't simply restart using them.
"The government has been unwilling to use existing powers against powerful corporations, maybe if we give them new and more expansive powers that'll do the trick. There's no possible way that these new powers will be turned against the powerless, right?"
> My hope is that this will drive a reformist movement around digital rights (speech, commerce, etc.) As well as a movement from platforms to protocols.
I don’t have much hope for this, mainly because being the owner of a platform is much more profitable than being one of many protocol end points. Look at git. It is hard to think of a more open protocol, and yet GitHub absolutely dominates and it is a big deal if they decide to cut off your repo.
A better alternative is for government to fund and operate critical infrastructure or at least heavily regulate it.
I don’t have to worry that I will get deplatformed from mail, because the USPS is there and they have strict legal requirements prohibiting them from deplatforming people. I don’t have to worry that I won’t be deplatformed from roads, because most roads are operated by the government, which is under strict legal precedents that they can’t deplatform me. It is similar with utilities such as electricity, water, gas which are privately operated but heavily regulated.
Some of the internet infrastructure is both becoming more vital as has economies of scale such that there is an inherent drive for consolidation. As such, I think it is becoming time that such things be regulated like utilities.
You are using the term "deplatform" completely wrong.
None of the things you mention are platforms.
Mail is not a platform. Roads are not a platform. Electricity, water and gas are not platforms.
These are all examples of point to point connection. None of them allow you to reach millions of people unfederated.
If you start sending out illegal hate mail to millions of people, you bet you'll be "deplatformed" by the USPS. They will cut off your account and probably press charges.
If we're going to be picky, they used the word "platform" as a verb, not a noun. Actually they used the negative, "deplatform"... maybe we could claim they used the wrong verb. I think they were trying to make the argument that high tech sector is finally providing services that are clearly in the public's interest and could/should be treated like utilities. I think they're right - the government should get involved in balancing the scales between service provider and users.
Is EFF doing the work to advocate for responsible regulation? Is there an alternative to EFF (Electronic Frontiers Foundation) that is more in line with the spirit of your comment?
...and stop the idea that you can make money by being a smart investor.
It is possible.
It is possible to make money buying lottery tickets too.
The best way to make money is to work for it. Yet because of a demand for profit and return on investment working people are getting squeezed with low wages and bad conditions.
Outrage at a invest platform doing some thing or another - I do not care about that. My outrage is at low wages and bad conditions for ordinary working people
I'm still wondering when we are going to get neighborhood-wide and then chained mesh wifi networks that bypass ISPs
I know that exists in pieces and small projects but it's not like more than a few dozen people in any town even can fathom what that is or why it's a good idea.
Google and Apple would never do this but imagine if every smartphone came not only with built in mesh-wifi ability but was on by default so it all acted as a repeater, you could probably communicate across entire states and countries given enough seconds like store-and-forward and ham radio-like solutions.
Never going to happen as long as people insist that stuff works on their walled-garden cellphone.
Cellphone lockdowns are the keystone here.
There are sensible arguments for cellphones being walled gardens (grandmas can't defend their phone against malware, etc), but this is the devil's bargain you have to accept.
As long as people (a) want everything on their cellphone and (b) want it to be locked-down enough that they can trust it to not listen in on them and stalk their location, everything downstream of the cellphone will be intermediated.
Nah, i have tons of open-protocol stuff on my cell phone. And i could make more (with some time and my technical knowledge) if i wanted/needed.
It would be nice if it was easier to enter/exit the garden at will, sure, but thats not the same thing.
I'm technically competent but these systems are so complex i don't think i could defend against malware in a complete open system. Actually, they're so complex that i do not think its possible to completely defend against malware as an end user without serious changes to behavior that is undesirable to most (eg. stop download apps so freely)
This isn't All One Thing. It isn't even all one thing inside the Robin Hood/Gamestop thing. Wall Street Bets got banned on Discord for calls to violent action, on the one hand, and their bets got throttled on Robin Hood because Robin Hood's data customers, who are legal-ishly front-running Robin Hood users, do not like what Robin Hood users are legal-ishly doing.
I’m less into the free speech component. I think companies should have the right to curate a community they see fit.
What I do care about is moving to protocols and data portability. I want the ability to switch to another provider if I’m not happy with their decisions. I absolutely don’t like my data being held hostage.
I also hope this realization extends to things like GMail which hasn’t yet seen a similar scrutiny
I just ran through a thought experiment--if Google (gmail) Apple (my phone) and Tmobile (the current owners of my number) all simultaneously nuked me, could I recover?
Luckily yes. Online access would be hindered, but nearly all my financial resources are handled through a local credit union.
That seems like that would potentially stave off government locking off access, which is where I am most vulnerable.
I'm not in fear of the government seizing my assets, but I don't trust Google not to lock me out due to an algorithm run amok, or Tmobile giving my number away due to simple social engineering (that actually happened).
Alternative take; the following are not major parts of your life:
> Robinhood, Parler, Twitter, Reddit (et cetera)
but represent trivial ephemera whose significance for the individual, following abandonment/deletion, vanishes into hindsight once the endowment effect and separation anxiety wears off.
At this rate, they will red pill everyone with a pulse. It's a good thing (/s alert) that we have legislative solution in the pipeline just in time to address the inevitable social consequences.
I think calling for violence then carrying out actual violence is a bit different than this. But yes, it's like these giants now have a taste for deplatforming and are liberally applying it now.
I doubt it. Robinhood is now citing misinformation as the reason to "protect its users". Misinformation and disinformation are really the weapons of mass destruction. Cite it, and you get your superpower. Twitter does it. FB does it. Media, oh media loves it. So, what's wrong with Robinhood again?
I agree, instead of the original idea of the internet being a utopia of free speech, decentralization and free trade, it has devolved into a place where a select few oligarchies reign supreme pushing their views and actions onto the billions of users forced into their monopolies. Laws do not apply to them and even when they break their own TOS there are no repercussions.
A strong digital rights for users is a good start, but I think the end goal is that they(the tech monopolies) are essential utilities for a majority of the world and should be regulated as such. A CEO should not be able to silence a democratically elected leader from a communications platform(congress or a govt. communications committee should decide), users should be able to buy the stock of their choosing(the SEC can decide to halt trading pending illegal behavior) and not have that right removed by a companies CEO.
I'm not optimistic an "open-source brokerage" will ever exist. Barrier to entry is probably too high/impossible to overcome. Big hedge funds would just flat out refuse your orders or prioritize them at garbage levels.
I think it is perfectly normal that major parts of ones life can be turned off by intermediaries. It is just that they have been become rather abstract and difficult to yell at.
This really doesn't track historically. Lots of voices have been historically silenced by American majorities because of hurt feelings or "decency."
It's also worth noting that America hasn't been uniformly ahead of the curve in terms of granting rights to those that were originally denied. Probably the worst example is getting rid of slavery, which was far more bloody than in many other places. In some other areas we've been ahead of the curve, in some behind. But note that some of that also came from the courts in controversial ways. The first amendment has not correlated to a better track record at granting groups their rights.
You might get fewer downvotes if you followed the HN rules, particularly "be nice". Also, in polite conversation, preemptively calling your fellow conversation partners fascists is a good way to get off on the wrong foot.
While I agree with your main point re name calling, it's absolutely not true that you get fewer downvotes if you follow HN's written rules. There are also unwritten groupthink (for lack of a better phrase) rules for which you _will_ get downvoted for. I don't have many controversial opinions but sometimes they are outside the generally accepted "truths".
This comment broke the site guidelines badly and you've been doing that a lot lately, unfortunately. We need you to stop doing this. Please see my more detailed reply at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25994701.
I actually agree with your premise, but I don't want to listen to you when you use self contradictory phrases like 'neoliberal fascists'. I imagine I'm not alone. You're getting downvoted because you sound incoherent and unhinged.
To be fair, terminology now is really confusing. I'm still trying to figure out what is anti-fascist about antifa or that really has anything to do with their existence.
Antifa is an anarchist direct action movement that tries to deny Fascist groups the ability to organize by basically beating the crap out of them when they try to get together.
"Fascist" isn't a synonym for "politics I don't like".
Sure, that's the textbook definition. But when I see them beating up folks, I don't necessarily see any evidence the recipients are fascists at all. So what do you call a group of people that unilaterally decide other people are fascists and then beat them up without any kind of due process, all in order to keep them from being able to "get together" and raise their voice? Authoritarian?
I am quite happy to see various platforms take on blocking commercial spam - this might be in their own interests (since they want to sell off the right to advertise rather than have people independently leverage their platform to spread advertising but I think it's fair to say that nearly no one wants completely unlimited speech.
I don't believe that the NYT should be required to print my novel into every sunday edition of their paper even if they do choose to print some letters to the editor - they have the right to choose what to print. A similar parallel was fax-vertising, where you send unsolicited faxes to random numbers in the hope that someone reads your flier and decides they want your services. Back in the day fax-vertising would result in a lot of paper waste since the fax would be instantly printed out, in the modern world people tend to screen incoming faxes, but it is still a problem... Your unlimited speech is causing someone to waste paper and ink to pay the cost of expressing your speech.
When it comes to digital information the cost goes way down and I agree that in this case the actions of social media platforms are pretty despicable but in all things we need to have balance.
(Also, please don't open up a statement by calling your detractors neoliberal facists - this isn't reddit)
I won't downvote you, but American history of free speech has some really dark spots. Read up on Comstock Laws or Sedition Act of 1918 and their victims.
Just like everywhere else, words on paper do not defend themselves, even if that paper is the Constitution. Authoritarian people will try to sneak in limitations into laws, free minded people will have to defend the principle.
In my experience—unless your comment is particularly helpful—starting a comment with “I will be downvoted for this” is only fishing for more downvotes then you’d otherwise get. This holds true on most internet forums I’ve visited.
Wow, guess I live in and being booted from the USA without me even knowing it now... IMO living is all about compromises, that way we all benefit from it as a society. But clearly not by being ignorant.
That it should be up to congress and law enforcement - people that are accountable to the public, to make these rules.
Everything about what twitter did was stupid. They let him talk for years, and then finally stopped him at the worst time. They cancelled him when there was little more damage he could do and ruined ideas of free speech neutrality and it allowed his ilk to claim censorship and it helped with making him a martyr. Just absolute stupidity.
Letting corporations deal with dangerous thought leaders is not a solution that has even the slimmest chance of working.
It's really hard not to think that Twitter's timing had alot to do with their stock price. It's hard to boot the user driving the most engagement on your platform.
I wouldn't say 'nearly'. The Capitol Riot definitely fit the standard definition of an insurrection.
Your 'single person' straw man aside, I don't think the conduits of conversation are the right place to attack this problem. It's just far too risky to have utterly unaccountable businesses be in the business of policing what people say.
I have the radical opinion that the police should be doing the policing. If people are criming online (threats of violence, planning to overthrow the government), they should get a visit from The Law.
Voter fraud happened. There's video evidence of it occurring in State Farm Arena in Fulton County, GA. There's forensic evidence of 70% failure rates on voting machines in Antirim County, Michigan. There's 1000+ witness affidavits signed and presented under the penalty of perjury in various legislatures around the country. There's also statistical fraud detection algorithms that have numerous red flags with regards to the 2020 election. Repeating the lie that claims of fraud are unsubstantiated is the real problem. We have a broken, hackable electoral system with systemic issues.
State Farm Arena video doesn’t show fraud to any reasonable degree, at the absolute best it’s an irregularity. The Antirim report is massively flawed, written by an ‘expert’ with no credibility who used Minnesota counties to ‘prove’ Michigan fraud. Hand waving at ‘affidavits’ is not evidence. The statistics arguments don’t stand scrutiny when known limitations like sample size, turnout volatility and count completion are taken into account.
Bundling together lots of individual garbage theories into giant piles doesn’t net you anything other than garbage theories, just like bundling bad mortgage securities didn’t mitigate risk in the subprime crisis.
Instead of saying ‘lots of statistical algorithms,’ name one, or even two, that stand up to genuine scrutiny (and that aren’t the readily debunked Charles J. Cicchetti claims.) Don’t hide behind the sheer number of crackpot theories. Or, you know, admit you have nothing but a hunch based on cognitive dissonance.
“The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors.
The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud.” Based on the study, the group concluded that the machines should not be used in Michigan nor should the election results in Antrim County be certified.
In this county, the vote was actually corrected. And knowing these machines were capable of 70% error rates should have triggered a full statewide forensic audit in Michigan at the least.
Heres the surveillance footage of 30K suitcase ballots with absolutely no chain of custody after the entire building was shut down and all poll watchers kicked out on the basis of a bullshit water pipe leak story, being counted between 11pm and 1am the night of the election: https://rumble.com/vblh33-attorney-jackie-pick-exposes-georg...
At any rate, it's not a hunch. It's a fact. The election was stolen. We live in a banana republic.
You have stated no less than three completely incorrect and unprovable statements that are contradicted directly by the facts.
1. The Antirim report was conducted by Russell James Ramsland who is the exact same non-expert person who mixed up Minnesota and Michigan. So, yes it does have something to do with it.
2. The report was not ordered by a judge, it was permitted. The distinction matters, because suggesting the judge 'ordered it' implies that it was some sort of impartial inquiry, instead of just another hack job by someone who wanted Trump to win.
3. The surveillance footage and the water pipe events happened on different nights, 17 hours apart.
That's just purely on the basis of facts that even aren't up for argument. There's much more to disagree with when further analyzing your claims, and while I'd be happy to go over them, I don't feel like a deep comment on an old news story is the best place for me to spend my time.
That your three main points contain full on factual misstatements should give you enough pause to reconsider the certainty of your conclusion.
link to sources please - like the source video, the source evidence on the failure rates, etc.
also explain why no court, no intelligence agency (local or international), and the vast majority of the US Senate (consisting of both major political parties) disagrees with your assessment.
Also if the presidential votes are invalid than I guess we need to assume all the other items on the ballet (house, senate, bills, etc) were also invalid correct?
Its amazing how all the power structure in the US was on the right (the Presidency, Senate, Supreme Court, Federal Courts, Appellate Courts), but somehow the left was able to perform one of the most coordinated acts of voter fraud in history. And not only that, performed the same fraud in the polls leading up to the election too.
If the left is this good at such a grand conspiracy, then they really should run the country.
Yes, well that's exactly what happens in socialist countries like Venezuela. It's not some theoretical formula for maintaining power that has never been tried before. Rigging and corruption is the rule not the exception, in human history.
We don't have the federal courts, not in the least. It's just fraud. The FBI would rather investigate Twitter shitposters than touch this. They'd rather get jobs at CNN as consultants to pitch their own actual conspiracy theory about Trump being a Russian stooge for three years despite having had exculpatory evidence the entire time. I don't know how Americans are so naive when it comes to the depravity of our system.
Again, the maintenance of rigging and corruption by the party being disenfranchised is NOT the rule.
It’s weird how almost every post you’ve done has been filled with factually wrong data, eg, the federal courts. But it helps explain why on less factual matters your bias so is severe. The sad part is I think you have no idea about your bias and actually believe what you’re writing.
When retail in traders en masse decide that a trading platform is impinging upon their rights, the SEC should be obligated to open an investigation. Isn't this pretty much a major component of their intended purpose?
I have a bit of knowledge from friends who work in fintech, and the sentiment among fintech companies seems to be that SEC doesn't matter. The fine is small and comes way too late. You can simply account for an approximate future fine and move forward with your shady business.
This will probably be my least popular post ever, but the explanation needs to get out there for why Robinhood stopped trading on GME.
Selling a stock short is NOT illegal. It is a perfectly valid type of investment according to the SEC:
“D. Are short sales legal?
Although the vast majority of short sales are legal, abusive short sale practices are illegal. For example, it is prohibited for any person to engage in a series of transactions in order to create actual or apparent active trading in a security or to depress the price of a security for the purpose of inducing the purchase or sale of the security by others. Thus, short sales effected to manipulate the price of a stock are prohibited.”
Basically – you can’t short sell a stock to manipulate the price down so you can buy a lot more of it later. If you believe a stock is overpriced and short sell it, that is legal. That is exactly what tons of retail traders and hedge funds do every day, including on Gamestop.
On the other hand, manipulating a stock price upwards to cause a short squeeze IS illegal according to the same SEC article:
“Although some short squeezes may occur naturally in the market, a scheme to manipulate the price or availability of stock in order to cause a short squeeze is illegal.”
Unprecedented numbers of people on Reddit, Twitter, and elsewhere collaborated to intentionally create a short squeeze on GME in the last week. No one talked about a fundamental case why Gamestop the company was worth a lot of money and would be successful in the future; instead everyone made the argument that due to a very high short interest of 100%+, that a short squeeze would send the price “to the moon”. That is illegal according to the SEC.
Multiple brokerages, especially Robinhood, probably had their attorneys tell them that “Hey, you are aiding and abetting illegal activity by enabling a short squeeze and could be liable criminally or civilly if you continue to allow this blatant illegal activity on your platform”. So they decided to stop it by only allowing people to close their positions rather than open new ones in support of the short squeeze.
Another strong reason is that if the short squeeze caused the GME stock to go to 5000 in a sudden leap, tons of traders (both retail and professional) could instantly go broke, and then the brokerage (Robinhood) would be left holding the bag. For example, picture a retail investor with a Robinhood account had sold call options in the amount of $100,000 and their account was worth $200,000. If the price gapped from 300 to 5000 and those options were exercised, that trader could have a loss of $10,000,000. He would lose the value of his account, $200,000… but the brokerage would have to make up the rest of the settlement and take a loss of $9,800,000. Now multiply that by thousands of accounts…. no brokerage wants to take the risk of being bankrupted, so they shut it down.
The two strong reasons Robinhood and other brokers stopped trading was to prevent legal liability from enabling illegal activity on their platform, and for wanting to avoid potentially massive banktuptcy from traders unable to cover their losses.
Wrong. The bull case was made for GME as far back as late 2019, and it gained momentum this year.
Nothing different than Jim Cramer talking up a stock on CNBC every fucking night.
Edit: I know this because I watched a youtube video from a popular redditor named deepfuckingvalue a few weeks ago and bought into the thesis fully as a value investment. He goes under the name RoaringKitty on youtube.
I lost multiple years worth of salary this morning when RobinHood decided to stop selling GME.
> Wrong. The bull case was made for GME as far back as late 2019, and it gained momentum this year.
That argument was made last year and early this year. The argument this week has been that the stock price will increase specifically because of a short squeeze, and the popular comment on WSB has been that buying and/or holding GME stock is a rebellious act that will cause that short squeeze to happen.
If deliberately causing a short squeeze constitutes illegal market manipulation, then at least some of the WSB comments advocate for going over that line. On the other hand, the SEC would probably have its hands full linking these comments to actual trades that were meaningful enough to move the stock price -- SEC rules aren't written with a horde of enraged small-dollar investors in mind as the culprits.
Notice that RoaringKitty has taken profits from his GME holdings over the past few weeks, most recently about two days ago, and has not continued buying into the stock.
> I lost multiple years worth of salary this morning when RobinHood decided to stop selling GME.
With all due respect, GME has been a highly speculative play for at least this entire week. It's not a good idea to speculate with money that you can't afford to lose.
So what? I know it's a highly speculative move. I know it's absurd to buy this stock at this price. But we should be allowed to. (Obviously not on margin).
I don't really think the market should allow for this sort of thing. I agree with you there. But that's how the rules are written, and now when the little guy figures out the rules they shut it down.
GME is trading at between 4x and 8x it's all time high in 2008. The graph of the stock price basically looks like a flat line until a few days ago where it dramatically spiked to far, far more than it's previous peak.
Are you saying that GME will actually be worth it's current stock price a year from now? Why is that?
I am sorry to hear about your losses, but that does not disprove my explanation. I also am a member of WSB and read all the top posts. I think most of them make the argument to hold the position as a short squeeze is coming, and very few of them argue the stock is truly worth a ton of money. Very few people actually believe a company that sells video games the same way Blockbuster sold movies has a lot of potential.
That absolutely disproves your explanation. You said nobody was making a case for GameStop being a good stock, and the other comment pointed out that the single most popular name associated with this trade has been doing exactly that.
You also quoted the SEC saying that manipulating a stock price to cause a short squeeze is illegal but also that short squeezes occur naturally. Expecting a short squeeze and intending to profit off of it is not illegal.
You make the point that some people on wallstreetbets made comments that crossed the line on manipulation. I'm sure that's true, but if you see a few problematic comments out of millions it's obviously absurd to say that a stock mustn't be bought because of them.
Ironically, you are criticizing what is clearly not manipulation (valuing GME highly and expecting to profit off of a coming short squeeze) in order to defend what clearly is manipulation (banning a million retail investors from taking one side of a trade at a critical moment).
I'm not a member of WSB, and I don't follow their forum. Having done an independent analysis and deciding that it is potentially a good (but risky) move for me, why am I not allowed to trade GME? I can trade any other stock this way.
> For example, picture a retail investor with a Robinhood account had sold call options in the amount of $100,000 and their account was worth $200,000. If the price gapped from 300 to 5000 and those options were exercised, that trader could have a loss of $10,000,000. He would lose the value of his account, $200,000… but the brokerage would have to make up the rest of the settlement and take a loss of $9,800,000. Now multiply that by thousands of accounts…. no brokerage wants to take the risk of being bankrupted, so they shut it down.
That's why every brokerage has a risk department. If you're a brokerage and you let thousands of customers write uncovered GME calls, you deserve to lose all your money and go out of business. Simple as that.
Brokerages do not have a fiduciary duty to prevent customers from losing their money in bad trades. It's one thing to shut down margin trading or even possibly options purchases, but to not allow people to buy a stock with their own money is pretty bad. There is zero risk to the brokerage there.
um, buying stocks is not a scheme to manipulate the price. However disabling purchases of a stock for millions of users does artificially suppress demand.
Also robinhood doesn't allow selling naked options so that entire point of yours is moot.
Interactive Brokers does allow naked selling of options, and also shut down trading probably for similar reasons. Robinhood could lose money in any number of ways if a stock gaps and some of it's customers go bankrupt.
If you buy or sell stocks with the intent to manipulate the price (either through a pump and dump scheme, or a short squeeze scheme) that is illegal. It doesn't matter whether the action is only buying or only selling. It is the intent.
Well I think probably most of the people on wsb have no idea what they're doing, those that trade on margin are extremely reckless and irrational. Having said that I still find absolutely ridiculous and highly corrupt that they solely stopped buy orders. If you stop trading that's reasonable, but to cap this off on one side and allow Wallstreet to make up for losses is unacceptable.
Robinhood's platform was allowing illegal activity - many people had come out publicly [0] saying they were attempting a short squeeze on GME which is illegal. Robinhood is extremely vulnerable to lawsuits for enabling that activity if they did not take action.
Assuming this is all true, it still just feels like they're picking winners, which is probably the thing that's going to matter more than anything else going forward. People can and will point to a laundry list of rules violations by institutional investors (is a 140% short of a stock completely and unambiguously within the rules?) that show the hypocrisy of the little guy getting screwed.
They aren't picking winners, they are avoiding lawsuits for allowing illegal activity on their platform. Short squeezes are illegal. You can see people collaborating all over WSB to create short squeezes, most frequently using the Robinhood app.
You keep repeating that short squeezes are illegal but that's not true. Manipulating prices to cause a short squeeze is illegal, but that's not what happened here. Some people bought GME because they liked the stock. Others bought because they thought a short squeeze was coming.
If I think the price is going up and buy, that's legal. If I manipulate the price to go up after I buy, that's illegal. It's the same thing.
> If the price gapped from 300 to 5000 and those options were exercised, that trader could have a loss of $10,000,000. He would lose the value of his account, $200,000… but the brokerage would have to make up the rest of the settlement and take a loss of $9,800,000.
What if the price of a stock went from $300 to $5000 for legitimate reasons, perhaps due to some technological breakthrough. The exact same situation would happen. Would shutting down trading also be justified?
The SEC has led the charge of government agencies away from anything that could reasonably be called regulation. Take note of how often the term 'oversight' is used vs 'regulation' when these guys are talking.
Yeah, I assume in reality, this is essentially the exact opposite what is happening. I would imagine the SEC is involved behind the scenes in coordinating these shutdowns.
That feels like a huge violation of their stated intent though.
There are lots of skilled but civic minded people in all the three letter agencies. The problem isn't people, it's ideology. Namely market fetishism and the assumption that if you're rich you just know better.
What? My point is that they see themselves as mall cops observing and reporting, not actively regulating behavior. That makes a pretty big difference in efficacy.
What you said was that they often use the word "observe" rather than "regulate," and that this is somehow reflective of the way they do their jobs. That's a purely semantic viewpoint and a ridiculous way to judge the efficacy of any regulator.
In actual fact, they use the term "enforcement action." Here's their report from 2020. See for yourself:
> Isn't this pretty much a major component of their intended purpose?
Reminds me of the scene in the The Big Short where the hot chick in the pool who currently works for the SEC (at the time) is in town in Vegas for a conference hoping to run into some Wall Street banker dudes so she can schmooze and float her resume to them. And it's not a conflict of interest.
I've been reading WSB since yesterday and while I understand the outrage about blocking trading. They started blocking trading with $GME trading in the $400's, and a slew of redditors on WSB, Discord & Telegram pushing penny stocks. It started out a crusade against the hedge fund shorting $GME and quickly turned into rallying dumb money to pump and dump penny stocks. Looking at the direction things were going it seems like Robinhood acted responsibly in cutting off the buys of AMC, BB, NOK, etc. They're all stocks that have been propped up artificially in the last 48 hours based on the hype and attention generated by the Gamestop story.
No one serious thinks Gamestop stock is worth $400+. Robinhood cut off buying at the point when unsophisticated investors were caught up in a stampede to "stick it to the man." Seems like they did the right thing.
Wall Street is/will be having a ball with the new administration desperate to keep the market "stable". Stable == deliberately and slowly bled by hedge funds.
Robinhood doesn't make money on trades - they make money off of commisions paid to them by high frequency traders. Basically there's some time between when I place an order and when a stock actually gets purchased. In that time, the price may change a bit. High frequency traders can buy at slightly lower prices than I could, and can sell at slightly higher prices than I could, so they can profit the difference without me noticing. Some of this excess gets paid to robinhood as a sort of finders fee.
Over many stocks and long periods of time, this works quite well. However the system breaks down if everyone is trying to buy the same heavily manipulated stock.
Should Robinhood be an arbiter of what is a reasonable trade and what people can spend their money on? Because if so, they have a lot of restricting to do to keep people safe...
What about the people that are trying to double down to protect their long position? What about the money they will lose? Either the market is efficient or it isn't.
Optimally the result is Robin Hood is removed from the play and apple store for willfully defrauding their customers. Very real damages were suffered as a result of their willful actions. There was no warning and there was no way they did not know harm would come. Also if no retail traders could buy, who was buying the shares that they were forced to sell? If it was the short hedge funds, that has got to be a criminal conspiracy level charge.
It's a bubble. Bubbles pop. Robinhood's argument would be that they prevented harm to investors by preventing them from putting money into a bubble that was going to pop anyway. As soon as this hit the news you got all kinds of regular people wanting to get in on the action, not connected to WSB.
Bubbles do pop, and this was clearly a bubble but this was not a popping bubble. This was someone picking up their ball and going home. They can make whatever argument they want, we will see how it is litigated out. It was a clear coordinated action though across several brokerages.
I read that GameStop was at one point worth $24B. Do you really think that's a realistic valuation? This bubble was always going to pop, the question was not if but when.
Sure let r/WallStreetBets and Wall Street battle it out. But I don't think that you are accounting for the ordinary people who would read about an amazing way to get rich quick in the news and decide to buy in. That's when the real bubble starts.
Bubbles pop all the time, and retail investors get fucked hard each time. Remember the housing bubble in 2008? How many people got foreclosed on? Did they have a Robinhood app to protect them? Absolutely not. Melvin Capital owns billions of dollars, it's not allowed to get fucked hard. Robinhood users, on the other hand, have access to a couple million at most. That's poor people levels of money. There are no golden parachutes for poor people.
Funny how that works. An algorithm, a computer, can ban your entire virtual presence at a whim, with no recourse. (talking about Google obviously).
But the opinions of incensed humans aren't worth the rollback it takes to "correct" the problem.
The entirety of google is a money making machine intelligence serving it's few wealthy owners, and absolutely disrupting and destroying everything else.
We need to take the torch to our big tech overlords.
My guess is that Google will get involved. It's not the first time a mob is trying to destroy the rating of an app. But their rating before all of this drama is not going to last; that's for sure.
But the app is broken. They are not allowing you to buy shares. Why should an app that decides you can't buy certain shares, and they auto-sells some shares you own, be rated highly?
Robinhood was always owned by the same Wall Street fat cats its users hate. They even sell the data on what retail investors are buying in real time to allow industry investors to take advantage of it.
If anything it’s amazing that it took this long for anyone to notice.
Because many people on social media encourage other people to give the app 1-point rating. That's something Google need to protect against. The poor rating should happen organically. But regardless, they are fucked.
So because -company- does illegal thing and people respond by using whatever means they have Google should silence the masses of disaffected users just because some people changed their rating? That is some grade a:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
Google doesn't care whether Robinhood succeeds or not. It cares whether people trust the Play Store ratings (and more broadly, trust the Play Store itself). They'll do what's needed to achieve their goals, not Robinhood.
it similar to how hacker news penalizes submission that rally for upvotes (specifically I remember a discussion about how posting links of your submission to twitter can penalize it)
What Robinhood is doing now is unethical and illegal. By limiting to users to only selling these stocks Robinhood is manipulating the market.
Citadel is a major source of funding for Robinhood. Citadel owns Melvin Capital Management. Melvin Capital Management is on the hook for billions in losses for their GameStop shorts.
How can it be more clear than this? People should be warned away Robinhood after this. Robinhood & Citadel should both be sued for manipulation of securities.
Thousands (millions?) Of people lost money / opportunity because of the app. Then those people rate what they think of the app - that ir cannot be trusted to act in their interest.
Why should Google protect them against consequences of their own decisions?
Excellent point. This vote-mob isn't due to some extraneous BS like some other ones, it's a response to an unexpected and customer-hostile service restriction.
I don't see how anyone could trust Robinhood with their money in the future.
Do you expect a trip down the highway will be free of highway robbery? It's called "highway robbery" for a reason... If you don't like it, stay off the highway!
While vote flooding via some confined social circle is a form of trolling I don’t think this case fits that criteria. This news isn’t limited to a subreddit. This news is everywhere, suggesting any vote flood is more likely natural and organic than not.
It's honest reviews though? I had a 5 star rating on the app and loved it. After what they've done today, I am switching brokers, and changed my review to 1 star. I would honestly no longer recommend Robinhood to anyone.
A stock trading app that encourages you to trade options, and then randomly(?) closes your positions should not only have a 1 star review, it should not be allowed to operate.
Actually, given that RH is currently only allowing people to sell their positions, and not buy into them, the only correct step is for the app stores to only allow RH to be uninstalled, and to block any new installations. All for the financial well-being of their users, of course.
By mob you mean the users who are justifiably upset the app is not working as expected by not allowing them to buy and forcing sales without user permission.
The sells were appropriate if bought on margin (once the share price took a dive). The thing is, RobinHood refused “buy” order that were completely inline with the margin requirements, and that caused the share price to dive.
Seems to be a coordinated move among all retail browsers (including IB according to people on this discussion - despite publicly claiming they are just hiking margins).
Basically, as of this morning, retail clients could only sell, whereas institutional clients could buy and sell as they wish.
Doesn’t sound remotely ok. In fact, sounds completely entirely not ok, and likely illegal (but I am not a lawyer)
> RobinHood refused “buy” order that were completely inline with the margin requirements, and that caused the share price to dive.
This is just a conspiracy theory. It doesn't even make sense. If GME was objectively such a good bet, you really think that those institutional investors out there were simply ignoring it? That Robinhood's users alone were the sole reason for the speculative spike in this stock?
This is a SCAM. Robinhood users were the VICTIMS. And I won't speak to their motives, and am no real fan, but the truth is Robinhood saved you people a ton of money by refusing those trades.
In the modern world the right to waste money is held to be very sacred - I have always viewed casinos as a great money -> fun conversion machine for those who can sensibly enjoy it... but for those who can't there isn't anyone stopping them at the door and saying "We already have 90% of your money, why don't you go home and enjoy a quiet evening of netflix".
The stock market has a long reputation of saying "Well, sucks to be you" when various scams are committed - even when a hedge fund manager burns through a bunch of retirement funds and then shows up at the company demanding their annual retainer so I am quite reluctant to buy that this one instance is when altruism is coming in to play.
A bunch of people are choosing to loose a bit of their money in exchange for warm fuzzy feelings - I think it's absolutely idiotic but then again I don't tend to patronize casinos either. If there is someone behind this running a pump & dump scam they absolutely should be prosecuted as normal, but falling victim to a financial scam on the stock market is one of those properties capitalist libertarians always hold up and they can't change their mind just because this one instance ended up screwing them over instead.
Margin accounts have capital requirements. If you’re over leveraged, they will liquidate your positions to ensure you have capital. This is standard. If people didn’t know about this, they have no business with a margin account.
1. Robinhood accounts are all margin by default. Most novice investors don't know the difference. They should, but I would wager Robinhood doesn't spend a lot of time educating people about this.
2. Long positions (buying and holding stock) aren't leveraged. There is no capital risk to holding a stock. If the sales of GME are entirely based on other positions being underwater, then sure, but it seems at least some of the examples provided aren't in that situation.
A broker can change margin maintenance requirements at any time, including for shares bought with margin. When using margin, a broker has wide latitude to liquidate positions of the account using margin.
Robinhood let’s you borrow money to buy stocks. If you borrow $10k to buy GME at $300 and it dropped to $100. There’s a risk to RH that you won’t be able to payback the loan. RH most likely will liquidate the position before it even hits $100 to mitigate the risk on the loan depending how leveraged you are.
I thought RH only allowed margin if you paid the monthly fee? Or, are you talking about margin for purposes of settling so you can trade again before a sale is fully settled?
It turns out that Robinhood accounts are margin by default, which is not really standard practice. I couldn't prove that this behavior (closing held positions without consent) was intended with that design, but it does feel pretty gnarly.
e: I'm leaving my original comment below for posterity, but I learned upthread that I was substantially misinformed here. Robinhood accounts are by default margin accounts, and their documentation describes this in an incredibly misleading way (https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/robinhood-accou...):
> When you sign up for a new account, you’ll automatically start with a Robinhood Instant account, which is a margin account. This means you’ll have access to instant deposits and extended-hours trading. You also won’t have to wait for your funds to process when you sell stocks or make a deposit (up to $1,000).
I stand by my claim that margin accounts necessarily require forced liquidation, but this is pretty indefensible.
-----
If the stocks were bought on margin it's entirely non-objectionable. Forced liquidation is a well-known practice that's fundamental to margin accounts as a concept - without it, a margin account is just an unsecured loan, and nobody's going to offer the average margin trader a low-cost unsecured loan for stock speculation.
4. Liquidation. In the event of the death of the Customer, or in the event the margin in any account in which the Customer has an interest shall in either Robinhood’s or the Introducing Broker’s discretion become unsatisfactory to either Robinhood or the Introducing Broker, or be deemed insufficient by either Robinhood or the Introducing Broker, Robinhood is hereby authorized; (a) to sell any or all securities or other property which Robinhood may hold for the Customer (either individually or jointly with others); (b) to buy any or all securities and other property which may be short in such accounts; and/or (c) to cancel any open orders and to close any or all outstanding contracts; all without demand for margin or additional margin, notice of sale or purchase, or other notice or advertisement, and that any prior demand or notice shall not be a waiver of its rights provided herein.
(emphasis added, and if you like that there's an arbitration agreement too.)
WE CAN SELL YOUR SECURITIES OR OTHER ASSETS WITHOUT CONTACTING YOU. Some investors mistakenly believe that their brokerage firm must contact them for a margin call to be valid, and that their firm cannot liquidate securities or other assets in their accounts to meet the call unless the firm has contacted them first. This is not the case. Although we may attempt to notify you of margin calls, we are not required to do so. However, even if we have contacted you and provided a specific date to meet a margin call, we can still take necessary steps to protect our financial interests, including immediately selling the securities without notice to you. We may forcibly liquidate all or part of your account without prior notice, regardless of your intent to satisfy a margin call, in order to protect your interests or our interests.
YOU ARE NOT ENTITLED TO CHOOSE WHICH SECURITIES OR OTHER ASSETS IN YOUR ACCOUNT(S) ARE LIQUIDATED OR SOLD TO MEET A MARGIN CALL. Because
the securities are collateral for the margin loan, we have the right to decide which security to sell in order to protect our interests.
WE CAN INCREASE “HOUSE” MAINTENANCE MARGIN REQUIREMENTS AT ANY TIME AND ARE NOT REQUIRED TO PROVIDE YOU ADVANCE WRITTEN NOTICE. These changes in policy often take effect immediately and may result in the issuance of a maintenance margin call. Your failure to satisfy the call may require us to liquidate or sell securities in your account(s).
A margin call that liquidates a customer is not only perfectly reasonable but responsible on the part of the broker. I would never hold it against Robinhood to liquidate positions or have restrictions on buying/selling stocks where the broker could be at risk.
The problem is that Robinhood is selling positions that are fully covered by their clients as well as prohibiting the buying of shares even when the purchase is 100% covered by the user.
I've been in this industry for 15 years now, including obviously the great recession, the flash crash, brexit, and a host of highly volatile events resulting in massive market swings and this is absolutely unheard of. I've never seen a broker prevent its clients from buying shares or liquidating shares that are fully accounted for and pose no risk to the broker.
@Kranar exactly. the actions of the gme swarm are reasonable given the positions and the patterns of actions we all recognize from short sellers. until now, short sellers have pretty much been playing a game of poker where no one ever called their bluff. Of course, the short sellers that lost out on this can just blame it on covid and get bailed out.
They're not reasonable. Just because someone has a short position doesn't mean you can stake a position deliberately to trigger a squeeze and profit from the result. That's exactly what the GME swarm has been doing.
"Although some short squeezes may occur naturally in the market, a scheme to manipulate the price or availability of stock in order to cause a short squeeze is illegal." - https://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/regsho.htm
I wouldn't be surprised if Robinhood and other brokers' compliance teams made the decision that the penalty for shutting down trading was less than the potential fallout for enabling illegal market manipulation behavior. Just because it's coordinated online between individuals doesn't mean that it's not illegal market manipulation.
The loophole here is that all new Robinhood accounts are margin accounts by default. You have to go through a process to switch from a margin account to a cash account and I suspect 95% of Robinhood's customers have no idea what the difference is or why they'd ever want to do that.
So Robinhood technically is allowed to do this as per the letter of the law, and now the question is whether Robinhood is violating any fiduciary duties they have to their customers.
But how many of the accounts have larger positions in GME than equity? It doesn't make sense to margin call or liquidate someone who is good for the whole amount. Also if someone has some leverage it's not reasonable to liquidate them completely.
This is exactly why people should be outraged. The type of risk that requires a margin call isn't present by just holding long positions in a security. Unless you are trading options or selling short, your equity is equal to your positions, and no margin call should be necessary.
They are literally using the margin call mechanic to force closures in positions that have no risk.
An unsettled ACH withdrawal that you initiated does not cause massive risk. It's a two-day float. There's no way to undo an ACH transfer; it's guaranteed funds. Even if you lose all of it, it doesn't matter, since they'll be paid back once the check clears.
I am in total agreement with you, this is outrageous. I'm only speculating as to what I believe Robinhood's position is, which is that these accounts are technically margin accounts and so Robinhood has the right to liquidate them as per the account "agreement".
I think it is ridiculous that Robinhood took the matters in their own hands to halt trading on GME. If anyone had to do this was the SEC. It is just outrageous.
I’m honestly very confused why people keep trying to draw a parallel between Parler and Robinhood. Beyond “big companies can do whatever they want” there really isn’t much in the way of comparison. And big companies doing what they want is something we’ve known about since around the time big companies first started to exist.
The comparison is not between Parler and Robinbood, it's a comparison between companies that canceled Parler and Robinhood: Sweeping, unilateral, unaccountable power of institutions we had not appreciated the power of previously.
I’ll agree that there are similarities between Parler and WSB Discord issue (how much hate speech is tolerated on your platform is a decision made by your service provider, not you) but the WSB Robinhood issue is something else altogether.
The Parler ban was a response from service providers so that they are not blamed for what their users (Parler) do (controversial opinion).
The GME/etc ban is a response from Robinhood so that they are not blamed for what theirs users (retail inverstors) do (controversial trading activities/losing money).
Serious question: Since RobinHood is a private company, does the "if you don't like it, you can build your own platform" argument apply here? Or does that only apply selectively when it benefits partisan politics?
This is the natural evolution when censorship as we've recently seen is given a pass.
No it doesn't apply. If you are dining in a restaurant and it starts putting cocaine into your coffee, that's still very illegal, regardless of whether you can choose another restaurant.
One sided halting in a moment like this reeks of market manipulation, which is illegal.
Holy shit, I can't believe people are comparing RH to Twitter, retail investment and corrupt hedge funds to people inciting violence against election results.
FWIW, this is an app in a supposedly regulated sector, making the call to affect stock prices and cut retail investors out of the market and causing a stock to tank.
I'm not comparing RH to Twitter, I'm comparing a private business' decision to a private business' decision, per your logic on the Twitter situation (banning any loud right-wing person). Time will tell if RH actually did anything illegal. If they didn't, then your previous Twitter logic should hold....i.e. "they're a private business and they can do whatever they want"....right?
I think what's ACTUALLY going on (whether your cognitive dissonance will allow you to perceive this comment or not), is that since this doesn't cut across political lines, you want to treat the situation differently.
Your comment doesn't get as much respect from me, because you think every loud right wing person is being censored on twitter, which is objectively, verifiably, bullshit. You are wrong. Incorrect. Lying? I don't know if you believe what you say or not.
Calls to violence from people in power are different from market manipulation.
I mean, doing something that will have a significant effect on markets is manipulation, which is regulated by the sec. It does apply, but it won't change. The only way to prevent this is removing the intermediaries, which events like this are pushing people towards.
I believe this is different because the SEC is involved, and if the SEC involved decides to rule that a broker cannot limit what stocks can be bought or sold because that would break the legal definition of what a brokerage is.
Does anyone know the law well enough to know if this is indeed a violation of any statutes?
That's just it though, Robin hood didn't delist gamestop. They just decided arbitrarily that their users are only allowed to sell it. Coincidentally, this is a move that highly benefits a major partner of theirs.
That connection is like 3 degrees of separation at best, though. Robinhood sells order flow to a number of market makers, one of which is Citadel Securities [1]. Citadel Securities is part of the Citadel group, which consists of a hedge fund (Citadel LLC) and a market making firm (Citadel Securities LLC) [2]. While both companies are owned by Ken Griffin and share many resources, they are split by a "Chinese Wall" [3] to prevent any conflict of interest between both sides of the firm. They also have different CEOs, management, employees, infrastructure, etc. as a result of this. Now, Citadel (the hedge fund) has invested $2 billion into Melvin Capital, which is one of the firms central to the whole issue [4]. Yet Melvin Capital has already closed its position in GME [5], which means that they no longer have a vested interest in the performance of GME.
There are several glaring problems with the theory that Citadel is pushing for Robinhood to ban buying GME for financial motives:
1. Robinhood has NO relationship with Citadel LLC
2. Everybody knows about the theoretical conflict of interest between Citadel/Citadel Securities so it is incredibly unlikely that Citadel Securities would risk doing anything to help Citadel in such a high profile scenario (i.e. the SEC/FINRA would be able to find out this kind of thing very quickly and very easily)
3. Citadel has no financial motive to stop trading of GME, because Melvin Capital has no financial motive to stop trading of GME
4. If it was as simple as trying to profit off of GME going down, why would they bother halting trades on other securities (AMC, BB, NOK, BBBY, etc.)?
This article does a really good job at explaining the situation (much better than I can do) [6]
Since the claim that they closed their position in itself would potentially influence the market to their benefit, I don't see a reason to trust their statement.
Either way, it would be illegal to say that they closed their position for the sake of influencing the market. The SEC really doesn't play around with that type of thing in such a high profile case
Because they risk running of being short squeezed in those stocks as well? Last time I check, big money isn't exactly throwing itself at airlines, mobile areas other than Android or iOS, and cinemas, even though two of those are bound to pick up later this year once covid is over and Black Berry is in talks with Baidu, which you can't ignore.
The big guys know all this, only they were hoping to short, make a profit, and then reinvest down the road when things picked back up, making even more money. WSB just capitalized on their strategy and now that they are losing, they are throwing a fit.
Robinhood can do whatever it wants and people can in response give it a 1 star rating. They can also complain about it not being a good platform to use. Freedom goes both ways.
You can also complain about Twitter or give its app a low rating or just stop using it.
This is a bit of a dense question - but being shut out of trading a stock doesn't physically threaten someones life. So not exactly analogous to the twitter situation you are clearly alluding to.
The reason why this happened is that their clearing house stopped fulfilling their orders (totally out of their control,) but Robinhood bungled this so badly, I honestly wonder if they'll ever recover. WeBull had to do the same thing but they have a clear reason rather than "protecting investors" etc.
I do agree Citadel, which I believe helped out one of the hedge funds in trouble form the short squeeze, being the clearing house is a "moral hazard" and a conflict of interest.
Robinhood phrased their message as if it was for user's own good. Moralizing everything beyond protocol and rules and law has serious consequences. It does nothing but driving people cynical. Didn't the elites learn the stories of USSR political jokes, the stories of how East Germans (and ancient Chinese people) talked to each other via eye contacts only? It's not hard to guess what will happen when enough number of people stop trusting the system. For that matter, I'm so glad that AOC and Td Cruz can agree with each other to probe Robinhood's practice.
I don't know if there's any communication protocol with eye contact. People were so afraid of persecution that they used only eye contact to exchange feelings, or so I read. One may argue that it's different this time aforementioned persecution came from the governments. Well, it's worth remembering that it was ordinary people who voluntarily snitched each other during those horrible times, believing that they were on moral high ground. Or just ask Chinese: who beat professors and school principals to death? Who thought that business owners deserved to starve to death? Who thought eating flesh of person was righteous because that person was born in a middle-class family?
It looks many Chinese have learned their lessons from their own painful history, yet Americans didn't even care about history at all.
That sound you hear is the evaporation of billions in pre-IPO Robinhood equity vanishing based on both a poor decision (to disallow buying of a stock that others could still buy) and worse, poor execution on their site that didn't make it clear how narrow the blocking was.
Those customers who have left Robinhood will never come back and it will take years to recover, if ever.
Steam (video game store) has separate "reviews" and "recent reviews" summaries, so you will see something like "reviews: mostly positive, recent reviews: overwhelmingly negative". It is often informative, as updates can make a good game unplayable, riddle it with microtransaction, or servers can go offline.
It also really helps in the opposite direction. Games that had release issues but fixed most of them have mediocre overall reviews but positive recent reviews, and I've found that's a pretty good sign that a game is worth trying. Without that separation, it would be much harder for the game to get over its rocky launch.
If Amazon did this, then it would solve the problem of grandfathered reviews from years ago being used to promote completely different inferior products. It would have saved me hundreds of dollars worth of returns.
But Amazon has no incentive to do so, because they would sell less items. Maybe with Steam the target market of gamers can direct so much more backlash towards something that doesn't work than the general audience of Amazon.
If a dev releases an update that breaks the app or fundamentally alters the behavior of the app, why should users not be allowed to offer an updated rating based on those changes. If ratings are due to some recent change, then of course it will naturally look like a swarm. Nothing nefarious about it. Any kind of artificial disruption of the users being allowed to post their review is artificially protecting the dev.
That (and the related sibling's comments) is a fair argument, but admittedly not what thought when I first pictured the term "mobbing".
For anyone actually affected by Robinhood, I think leaving 1-star rating it is absolutely just.
However, mobbing, to me, is when the random internet gets out its pitchforks and finds something to dogpile on, even though they might not have been affected personally.
> For anyone actually affected by Robinhood, I think leaving 1-star rating it is absolutely just.
Given the claims that (various high percentages above 50%) of RH users had one of these meme stocks, that should still drive the rating to 1-star.
Especially if you also count everyone as "affected" who bought through another broker and who saw those shares plummet once RH destroyed retail "investor" (read: gambler) demand.
>even though they might not have been affected personally
It's unrealistic to imply that people shouldn't share opinions of behavior if they weren't directly and personally affected by that behavior. You're also making a large assumption that cases you would define as "mobbing" consist of a significant portion of people unaffected.
> It's unrealistic to imply that people shouldn't share opinions of behavior if they weren't directly and personally affected by that behavior.
The thing about opinions nowadays is that they are manipulated right and left. It has become absolutely trivial to whip up a mob into a frenzy.
This isn't to say that any concerted movement against something one was not personally affected by is illegitimate. Clearly, one does not need to be a person of color to support BLM.
My question regarding the mobbing prevention was in the spirit of the first form.
In certain cases, it's deserved and appropriate. If an app is scammy and the majority of its users believes it's a bad app, it should have its rating dropped.
It's strange that you're ignoring the fact that if an app does something bad that affects many users, those many users will, reasonably, review the app poorly. You're implying that all sudden influxes of bad reviews are somehow illegitimate, which is a confusing position.
It provides a more timely signal about an app's rating.
In its absence, you'd have the Amazon effect -- accumulate five star volume, tank / exploit the product, coast as your average is very slowly dragged down.
I don't know if that's a positive, but companies like Google often cave to the mob and the press demanding deplatforming of certain individuals. If they remove the ratings then that will just prove, once again, what their allegiances are. Except now a lot of people are watching really closely.
I don't have a problem with this specific case, I'm thinking of, for example, users of 2 different apps having a war with each other and going in and leaving negative reviews for the other app.
Steam (the video game distribution platform) does "recent reviews" and "all reviews" so that you can tell if there has been a recent influx of positive or negative reviews.
Most of the other brokerages (Schwab, Etrade, and TD Ameritrade, but NOT Fidelity and Vanguard according to the reports I am getting) are participating. According to the rumor on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassActionRobinHood/comments/l723k... the call came from the White House.
I wouldn’t give that rumour any serious thought considering there’s literally nothing backing it up and it mostly just feeds what people already want to believe.
People are pointing out in the comments that some of the details don’t line up, like him being based in the wrong city and him overhearing conversations while WFH.
For real, despite three years of QAnon people are still failing miserably to apply any incredulity about whatever they read on the internet. That it affirms their beliefs is all that matters, never mind its veracity.
The crazy rumors aside, at least this whole mess has clarified for me which brokerages to give my business to and which ones to boycott. It is the free market afterall, and people will be choosing with their $$$ which ones to support and which ones to boycott. The 1 star rating, while a bit extreme, also is part of the same idea.
You also kinda had it coming when you called yourself "robin hood" and then immediately bent over the moment the slightest challenge appeared.
In the words of Joe Biden, that rumor is pure malarky. I saw Vladimir on CNBC this morning in what looked to be his home. Unless the "low-level computer science" person was in the founders home, it seems very unlikely he "overheard" a convo with the White House. It seems like a dog whistle to me.
Can someone who knows more about such things than I explain to me why their weird response to the situation (halting buying, but still permitting selling) was deemed by them to be the best of their options (the other two obvious ones being to temporarily stop dealing in those securities entirely (halting buying and selling), or to continue letting people trade them as they had the previous day)?
It's confusing to me. I'd think if they were being risk-averse or something they'd have stopped dealing in them entirely until the craziness passed. The "you can only sell, not buy" part seems... odd to me.
It is very likely that their "upstream" partners asserted this, and Robinhood didn't have much of a choice. Their biggest mistake is probably the god-awful communication with customers about this decision.
Another thing to note is that one of Robinhood's main investors from their last round, 'D1 Capital', is also down 20% this year [1] with a fund size of 20 billion, so that's a 4 billion dollar hole for them to recover from.
I've only seen mention of Citadel but the short squeeze on these stocks (blocked stocks) continuing could literally have made D1 Capital explode.
In the aftermath of this fiasco, perhaps Robinhood can get away with a small fine. Even a billion would be less than the collective sum all hedge funds involved could have lost had this upward price movement continued.
First, RH aren't the only ones blocking GME purchases.
Second, if popular trading platforms artificially block demand, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, and the stock is going to plunge by this action alone.
Given Citadel's involvement, this is blatant market manipulation, and I hope people go to prison for this. Ftr, I never traded individual stocks, so I'm not affected, but this is still bullshit.
You mean people who bought a hot potato might be stuck owning it when the music stops? Make no mistake, the music will stop and someone will be left holding it. Might as well be the folks holding it right now.
In the simplest, likely potentially inaccurate explanation... Robinhood doesn't actually make the trades. They pay someone else to make the trades, add a small amount to the price, and that's how they get to 0$ trading price to the end user. The upstream party is refusing to do things, so Robinhood has no choice but to follow the rules that party set.
That's like, way over simplified but gets to the gist
When your marketing model is built entirely on sticking it to the man, how do you communicate that the man has you by the balls and you have no recourse because your business model is built on the man paying you off.
You do this clearly, because if you don't give people a good explanation, they'll find one elsewhere. And the person giving that explanation probably doesn't care about preserving your reputation.
My understanding is that Robinhood didn't actually block these purchases but rather the service they use to buy/sell stocks blocked it called Citadel
So it's not Robinhood, persay, but rather Citadel.
Why did Citadel block purchasing of GME stock? Because Citadel just invested 2 billion dollars in Melvin Capital Management; one of the hedge funds that has a lot to lose as long as the GME stocks keep going up.
That's the rumor but there's no evidence to back it up. Melvin could've closed their GME positions days ago, in which case Citadel wouldn't be on the hook for any further price changes.
I think this is possible, but do we know for a fact this is the case? Melvin claims they already got out of the GME trade. They could be lying, but they would open themselves to a lawsuit from investors if they were.
I'm not sure if Citadel can just refuse to purchase GME (RH could just go elsewhere), but maybe they said they wouldn't pay RH anymore for order flow unless they blocked it. But do we know that Citadel did this? I've only heard speculation to that effect.
RH could not just go elsewhere; moreover, they absolutely could not go elsewhere today. Handling order flow for automated transactions isn't something you can find on short notice.
citadel only handles like 10% of their order flow. the rest is other companies. including Apex clearing which also handles it for Webull and other platforms that halted trading
I really don't think you'll get a good answer from anyone for a couple of days at least. This is quite unprecedented (not them halting buying of a certain stock, but the whole situation with its underlying context).
Yeah, I keep seeing this claim posted that Citadel owns Robinhood, but I can't find any evidence to back it up. The Wikipedia pages for each don't mention the other.
This is a jabberwocky sentence. It is syntactically correct but there is nothing in the real world to which it could be referring. Brokers do not "support" stocks.
It's not even that it rounds to 1 star, it's actually 1.0 stars (according to the aria-label on the HTML). The difference between a 1.4 and 1.0 is huge in terms of what percent of reviews are actually favorable.
I honestly feel bad for all the employees, especially the early ones with equity that were looking forward to cashing out after the IPO - now they have to deal with immensely negative PR and federal investigations.
For this reason I imagine that the first unconfirmed leak mentioned in another post will be far from the last. As if WSB vs. hedge funds wasn't a crazy enough story itself, the sequel to The Big Short is pretty much writing itself as the other players in the system expose exactly where they stand. Regulators and the Federal Government chapters incoming...
I fully agree that the tweet is not proof. I fear that nothing will come forward in any case. My point is: It could be true and we'd never see proof. That doesn't mean we should assume it to be true. Neither does lack of proof imply that it has to be untrue. In other words, we will probably never know for sure. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I smelled a rat in Robinhood back when they first showed up. When something goes from paid to free, the only appropriate response is to question how that happened, and what changes in motivation now exist.
I feel like this action from Robin Hood saved a lot of retail trader from self harm.
A lot of people are clinging to the hope that whatever came out of shorts covering their position being false. Whereas given the volume of the previous days it's highly likely they've already gone. Whoever goes in at this point is likely going to end up losing everything.
More importantly it saved hedge funds like Melvin and Citadel form self-harm. They aggressively shorted these stocks into the ground, looking to make billions. If the prices stay up or keep going up, they stand to lose billions and even go out of business.
If you look at r/wallstreetbets, only a few people seem to have invested more than a couple of tens of thousands. The guy who came up with this idea to profit off of short squeeze seems to have invested only 53k. Most other people invested a few hundred or a few thousand. Also, people on r/wallstreetbets routinely show screenshots of their losses. It's kind of preposterous to move forward assuming these people don't know what they're doing, and Robinhood saved them...
These trading platforms are blatantly intervening to save the hedge funds, not the Reddit traders. Government may have a say in it, too, because they want market stability. And if these hedge have to sell their long positions to cover shorts, it could put a big dent in the market and even cause a larger scale crash.
how would that cause a crash? Retail (and less shady institutions) will buy more aapl when it dips and all that's happened at the end of the day is a big transfer of wealth from institutions to retail (and less shady institutions).
To cover their short position at a huge loss, funds would have to sell their long positions, which is basically a big sell-off. That may be just temporary. But in a deep bubble it could trigger a mass selloff and a recession.
Bowing to the whims of established trading firms to protect said firms being squeezed by a crazy army of day traders is a great way to ruin the rep your “Robinhood” trading app stands for. Score one for the little guy.
I’m hoping RobinHood gets sued out of existence and many of these hedge funds burn. The industry’s response to this is stupid and classist: “we can’t have randos making money...” as irrational as the system is it is working as is.
I wonder what percentage of Robinhood users hold GME - if it's more than 25% I'd say they're finished. If we assume 25% of users hold GME and 80% of GME holders will not return after this fiasco that's extremely significant IMO.
Not to say that they'll cease to exist, but I doubt they'll remain the "#1 trading platform."
Although they've left the tweet up, the article it links to says that this is incorrect: "Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that 56 percent of Robinhood users hold GME stock. This is incorrect, based on a misreading of a statistic on Robinhood. Motherboard regrets the error."
I can say with 99% certainty that they aren't just counting invidual $GME holders, but every one of Robinhood users that holds an ETF (like total US Market) that contains $GME...
So this is really such a bad faith statement from Motherboard, because all of the ETF holders (probably 90% of the "half") can still sell their ETF's and thus their indirect $GME shares...
I think GME is one of the freebie stocks that Robinhood gives out as a referral bonus, so many of those users might just have had one stock incidentally.
From what I understand Robinhood's actions today only impacted derivatives of GME, not trades involving the actual underlying equity (which, I imagine, is what most people actually own).
This is interesting in that it provokes the question of what an app's rating "means". Clearly, if you were getting the app because you expected to be able to trade GME and you can't, then this is a good signal not to get the app. But not all "protest votes" of this sort may be equally good signals.
I would argue most of the 1 star reviews are users like myself feeling betrayed who are speaking with their dollar, share, and review votes by leaving the app entirely.
I had already transferred all my stocks from Robinhood to my company provided Fidelity account sometime back after reading about their shady practices last year:
It can also take a while for a rating to go through. Once you tap the allotted stars you'd like to rate an app, you need to wait until you see the "Your feedback was submitted" modal to appear.
Opinion: With such wild swings in emotion in the markets right now in general, you can't expect investment app ratings to be even remotely objective.
IMO Apple is making proactive moves to protect their store's rating system reputation, such as it is.
I've used RobinHood since 2016 (not my only brokerage) and the app continues to be fine. It's not a race car, it's more like a family sedan. The company has been reasonably good at messaging and a number of other brokerages also halted buying of $gme, $nok, etc.
So not only is RobinHood not getting a fair shake (we haven't even heard their side of things), but other brokerages are getting _way_ more than what's fair for them given that they did the exact same thing.
I know, crazy point I'm sure, but even if you have a bad reputation, you should work to keep it from getting worse.
RH app reviews right now are going to be way too emotional, and they'll stay there no matter what RH does in the coming days. This will take Apple's reputation down a notch on both ends--app developer and app reviewer.
Scanning the complaint quickly... it's not a strong case. The problem plaintiffs have is that the contract they signed lets Robinhood essentially refuse to trade if it wants to. In order to defeat that, you're going to have to argue that those contract provisions violate federal law and are therefore unenforceable. That's not really want the complaint does. Instead, it seems to argue that Robinhood's error was in failing to allow trades in GME in the first place, not in the reasoning for its failings. (At least they actually allege enough of this to potentially get discovery, which is better than some other complaints I've seen recently).
It won't. Everyone who has an account at RH has contractually agreed not to bring or participate in a class action suit and has contractually agreed to arbitration.
Not only they cheated their own users, they also artificially manipulated the market and that eventually defrauded users of other brokers who legitimately expected a buy pressure coming from Robinhood users.
So, 1-star is even too much, jail time would be preferred.
I don't know what the next step is, but the fact that pretty much everyone knows that there will be no jail time despite them openly committing crimes to defraud so many people isn't going to lead us somewhere good.
There should be zero stars available for scamsters. Seriously this should be an option. Why should anyone give one star to a scamming firm Robbing Hood which has colluded with their backer Citadel. They have derogatory term for Retail Investors - Dumb Money. Now the 'Dumb Money' has figured out the the hedge funds'rigged game.
Could you please review the site guidelines and stick to the rules when posting here? They include:
"Please don't fulminate."
That means please don't post comments in which indignation overwhelms information. That lowers signal/noise and escalates activation in others, which takes us away from curious conversation.
Visually, allowing 1 to 5 stars inflates the way ratings look, because the first star is always present, even for the worst products.
Imagine if it was pie chart or a bar chart: the lowest rating would look like 20%, not 0%.
Or imagine a product where 50% of people gave it the lowest rating (1 star) and the rest gave it the highest rating (5 stars). This would be presented as a 3/5 star item, which visually appears quite a bit better than its real rating (50%).
That's a consequence of the UI pattern - when you use the same widget as indicator and input, you need some way to represent "no vote yet" - plus, it would be hard to click/tap "no stars". It could be done better but alas, minimalism is the name of the game.
Youtube routinely scrubs views, likes, and dislikes from videos based on attempts to discern if they're fraudulent. You can't believe that this is evidence that Youtube is conspiring to support Biden unless you also believe that Youtube is conspiring to suppress BTS, the famous K-Pop boy band: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-YouTube-delete-views-from-BTS-...
I get that people are pissed, but this is exactly the same thing that the Qanon idiots were doing - going along with the wildest theories and calling anyone who questioned them complicit. By doing so, they destroyed their entire movement and the cause they were fighting for.
This reminds me of how casinos can kick people out for any reason or no reason at all. Treat meme stocks like a trip to the casino: don't wager more than you can lose.
Better to have 1 star and stay open than to be shutdown one way or another.
Music, taxis, retail, newspapers, politics and others have been disrupted by technology and the incumbents have suffered.
The establishment players have all seen this and they aren't going to let it happen again to them. They'll let technology in but only the way they want.
And now that deplatforming companies and powerful from credit-card, cloud providers, app stores, communications is normal and accepted they have more power and control than ever.
If I was robinhood I would do the same thing. Standing up for a principle is only going to get you shutdown and have everyone hate you after the fake news vilifies you and drags you through the gutter.
The current thread is paginated like all the other big threads (to spare our poor server—yes, we're working on it). If you want to see all the comments you'll need to click through the More links at the bottom, or like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25947697&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25947697&p=3
(and so on)